Content descriptions

Part I. Padrone -- Children of the wolf -- Back to the future -- The exhaustion of cruelty -- Part II. Cosa nostra -- The last Roman -- Let them hate me -- Io saturnalia! -- What an artist.

Summary, etc.:

Author and historian Tom Holland returns to his roots in Roman history and the audience he cultivated with Rubicon -his masterful, witty, brilliantly researched popular history of the fall of the Roman republic-with Dynasty , a luridly fascinating history of the reign of the first five Roman emperors. Dynasty continues Rubicon 's story, opening where that book ended: with the murder of Julius Caesar. This is the period of the first and perhaps greatest Roman Emperors and it's a colorful story of rule and ruination, running from the rise of Augustus through to the death of Nero. Holland's expansive history also has distinct shades of I Claudius , with five wonderfully vivid (and in three cases, thoroughly depraved) Emperors-Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero-featured, along with numerous fascinating secondary characters. Intrigue, murder, naked ambition and treachery, greed, gluttony, lust, incest, pageantry, decadence-the tale of these five Caesars continues to cast a mesmerizing spell across the millennia.